Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gregory Benford

My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do.

Mark Billingham

More than 100 years after he first appeared, Holmes remains the template for the fictional detective.

Denis Diderot

How easy it is to tell tales!

Elizabeth Bowen

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

Elizabeth Bowen

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Elizabeth Bowen

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

Sarah Dessen

I have a tendency to embellish: I think it's a weakness of fiction writers. Once you know how to make a story better, it's hard not to do it all the time.

Elizabeth McCracken

Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.

Sue Monk Kidd

I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.

Kevin Fisher

Mayor Coble likes to talk about the knowledge economy. Maybe what we need first is more knowledge about how to plan and manage public works projects.

Darin Strauss

My knowledge of trains - and love before first sight, love at negative-one sight - comes from Alfred Hitchcock.

Daisy Ridley

My film knowledge is pretty shocking. I'm trying to correct that.

Denis Diderot

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

Elbert Hubbard

It does not make much difference what a person studies-all knowledge is related, and the man who studies anything, if he keeps at it, will be learned.

Eleanor Roosevelt

To appear to be on the inside and know more than others about what is going on is a great temptation for most people. It is a rare person who is willing to seem to know less than he does ... Somehow, people seem to feel that it is belittling to their importance not to know more than other people.

Eduardo Chillida

Whatever I know how to do, I've already done. Therefore I must always do what I do not know how to do.

William Butler Yeats

I would be -- for no knowledge is worth a straw --Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.

Bob Berg

Somebody in their 50s is going to have a lot more not only technical knowledge, but also street knowledge than somebody in their 20s who's still on a learning curve.

Albert Schweitzer

We are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live his life for himself alone.

Albert Schweitzer

The thinking man must oppose all cruelties no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo.

Albert Schweitzer

For us the great men are not those who solved the problems, but those whodiscovered them.

Albert Schweitzer

Once a man recognizes himself as a being surrounded by other beings in this world and begins to respect his life and take it to the highest value, he becomes a thinking being. Then he values other lives and experiences them as part of his own life. With that, his goal is to help everyone take their life to the highest value; anything which limits or destroys a life is evil. That is morality. That is how men are related to the world around them.

Albert Schweitzer

Cold completely introspective logic places a philosopher on the road to the abstract. Out of this empty, artificial act of thinking there can result, of course, nothing which bears on the relation of man to himself, and to the universe.

Albert Schweitzer

Pablo Casals is a great musician in all he does: a cellist without equal, and extraordinary conductor and composer with something to say. I have been profoundly impressed by all I have heard of his work, but he is a musician of this stature because he is also a great man.

Albert Schweitzer

The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own.

Albert Schweitzer

The destiny of man is to be more and more human.

Albert Schweitzer

Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.

Robert Klein

In some articles written about me, writers have said I'm a link between the old and the new, and I think, in a certain sense, that's legitimate.

Aminatta Forna

Most writers I know go for word counts, and I used to be a journalist, so I guess that's ingrained.

Claire Tomalin

Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.

Scott Adsit

'Monty Python' and 'The Simpsons' have ruined comedy for writers for the rest of our lives.

Charlaine Harris

Well, you know, writers just suck up new experiences - we're just like the vacuum cleaners of newness.

Brian K. Vaughan

There are probably writers who are much more visual than I am and some who are less. I like to think of myself as a happy medium.

Sara Sheridan

Scottish writers are particularly successful in the crime genre.

Chevy Stevens

Unfortunately, there's still a lot of beginning writers who think you can just write your first draft and hand it in.

John Dos Passos

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.